Regarding what toys can contribute to technology or to machines etc. I can report something "special". Since I was 12 years old I had something called "fischertechnik". There is a company called "Fischer" in Southern germany in Tumlingen. Fischer produces wall plugs and screws etc. - but one day they added the system called "fischewrtechnik". It allows for constructing machines vehicles and much more. It includes motors, axles, switches, electromegnts, wheels of different sizes, gera-wheels of different sizes, electronics, lights and much more.

They also had a club on all this and the club had a kind of journal. I remember an article reporting that a company used fischertechnik in production because they simply didn't know a feasible alternative. I think it would be hard to find that article now.

As far as I remember they didn't use fischertechnik in preliminary stages but in production directly - the toy ssystem inclided some innovations and reliabilitioes etc. that company didn't find nowhere else. And it was cheap. By far it could be compared to PCs expanding from the consumer world into the business world.

Just a quick update on production of nanotube sheets. Potential uses could be for the next space shuttle and equipment onboard it. If they could use this technology they would bring the weight down somewhat. I'm sure some others here have some ideas of potential uses in space?

Large, transparent sheets of carbon nanotubes can now be produced at lightning speed. The new technique should allow the nanotubes to be used in commercial devices from heated car windows to flexible television screens.

"Rarely is a processing advance so elegantly simple that rapid commercialization seems possible," says Ray Baughman, a chemist from the University of Texas at Dallas, whose team unveils the ribbon in this week's Science1.

Nanotubes are tiny cylinders of carbon atoms measuring just billionths of a metre across. They are light, strong, and conductive. But for years their promise has outweighed their utility, because the complicated processes involved in making devices from nanotubes were too slow and expensive to be used in large-scale manufacturing.

But now, nanotubes have gone into warp drive. Baughman's team can churn out up to ten metres of nanoribbon every minute, as easily as pulling a strip of sticky tape from a reel (see video ). This ribbon can be up to five centimetres wide, and after a simple wash in ethanol compacts to just 50 nanometres thick, making it 2,000 times thinner than a piece of paper.

The ribbons are transparent, flexible, and conduct electricity. Weight for weight, they are stronger than steel sheets, yet a square kilometre of the material would weigh only 30 kilograms. "This is basically a new material," says Baughman.

Nanoforest

Scientists have been weaving carbon nanotubes into fibres and sheets for several years (see 'Yarn spun from nanotubes' ). But until now, the most common way of making large sheets of nanotubes relied on a labour-intensive technique much the same as that used by the ancient Egyptians to make papyrus. Nanotubes suspended in a solvent were slowly filtered to create a mat, which was then dried and peeled off the filter.

Baughman's team instead start with a 'forest' of half-millimetre-long nanotubes sticking upright on an iron-based platform. Pulling gently from the edge of the forest with an adhesive strip, such as a Post-It note, uproots a row containing millions of nanotubes. As these nanotubes pull out, they tangle with the next row, and so on.

The nanotubes tangle together just enough to keep a ribbon growing, without jumbling up into a huge ball. "They've found the magic spot," says Ian Kinloch, a materials scientist at the University of Cambridge. "A lot of people will now try this out with a Post-It in their own labs." The team says a one-centimetre-long forest of nanotubes can produce three metres of nanoribbon.

The researchers had previously used a similar method to draw strings of nanotubes from a forest2. Getting them to knit into a wider fabric is a bit trickier, but Baughman says that scaling the work up to produce large sheets will now be "easily do-able".

Patent bonanza

Nanotubes are already replacing graphite in certain commercial devices such as batteries. But this technique could now propel many more nanotube products into the marketplace, agrees Kinloch.

The team has already proved the sheets' usefulness in several applications, filing patents as they go. They have sandwiched a nanoribbon between two Plexiglass plates, for example, using the heat of a domestic microwave oven to weld the layers. This forms a transparent, conductive sheet ideal for a heated car window, they say.

And since bending does not change the electrical properties of the nanotubes they could be used to carry current in a 'rollable TV screen', something that has long been promised by nanotechnologists.

"Things move quickly if you can prove that the supply of the material is good," says Baughman.

"ACNR (Aggregated Carbon Nanorods) is harder than diamond...So, on a Mohs scale is it an 11? "

"Sheets of carbon nanotubes have been created in a scalable and relatively fast process that produce, after a wash, a 50nm thick sheet that weights 30 kg per square Km. "

"The researchers at Argonne labs are also attempting to produce a diamond-nanotube lattice, and so far have induced the diamonds and nanotubes to grow together and connect, but have yet to achieve a pattern or regular formation. "

"The second, the fast (7 meters per minute) production of nanotube sheets really sounds promising, as it appears to have great tensile strength."

It's great that we are making progress and things will speed up and mass use of these technologies isn't very far away either. There are many space applications that needed this sort of breakthrough. Apparently no one here on these forums are at all interested in such developments...

A lot of optimism around here

The only way we are succesfully going to get cheap space travel and colonization is through the use of the emerging field called, Nanotechnology.

Rather than seeing incremental progress in the production of Nanotubes, we are seeing huge leaps of progress in a short amount of time. This should be an exciting time for space travel as many technologies are merging together to make it more accessible more possible for humans. This breakthrough is HUGE in terms of how it will change many industries, including SPACE.

On the contrary Whoa, a lot of us I'm sure are excited about the new development, but we're very cautious about getting our hopes up. I don't know what anyone else's story is, but the last time I chose to be an optimist was around 1989, when those two guys were claiming they had achieved ignition with cold fusion in a glass of seltzer...

Ok that's an extreme example, and this is obviously a real breakthrough. But it is important to note that there are already alot of exotic materials available, with very useful properties, but they don't get used much because they're too expensive. Solid platinum rings would make a wonderful hot-pack catalyst in John Carmack's old H2O2 monoprop engines, but he gave up and switched propellants because, well, platinum is expensive. As far as I know, nanotubes are still WAY expensive. The problem with space travel is that it's WAY expensive. There's no guarantee that it will come down in price drastically, but there is hope. People around here are mostly of an engineering mindset, if not actaually professional engineers, and you don't do engineering based on the hope of a new wondertech becoming available. If you did, you wouldn't be working very long as an engineer.

Ok, so I'm not trying to throw cold water on your party, because there is reason for optimism with this technology. I'm personally interested in how they work out as solar cells. But I hope I've outlined the basic reasons why you don't see us breaking out the champagne just yet.

On the contrary Whoa, a lot of us I'm sure are excited about the new development, but we're very cautious about getting our hopes up. I don't know what anyone else's story is, but the last time I chose to be an optimist was around 1989, when those two guys were claiming they had achieved ignition with cold fusion in a glass of seltzer...

Scepticism is sometimes a useful trait. One thing that's justifiable when looking at press releases or science articles about new materials is to read between the lines. Like when the glassy titanium alloys were making news, with figures available on strength and elastic elongation, but nothing about plastic deformation. It would be reasonable to assume the worst, i.e. it was quite brittle. A few months later it was confirmed that this was a problem. Now there's news about nano-rods with information about modulus but not compressive or tensile strength, it would be reasonable without further evidence to assume that they would be about the same as flawless diamond but not significantly higher. With the nanotube sheets it's similar again, they're saying that the alignment is as good as in in the strongest filament specimens tested. That's another way of saying they can get good fibre alignment but that it hasn't really been accompanied with any great development of strength and that there are problems with adhesion between the molecules. Strength maybe similar to high-end graphite fibre.

Whenever a value isn't quoted or people seem to be being indirect, either that value it isn't known or it isn't good. Maybe I'm completely wrong about some of these examples, but the few articles I glanced at over the last few weeks didn't go out of their way to convince me that I was.

There's room for flexibility, but I'm terribly sceptical about mass produced nanotubes reaching anywhere close to the upper end of their strength estimates anytime soon(and perhaps ever). It's similar to being led to believe that steel of strength in excess of 60GPa will soon become available. It's widely known that at small scales molecular materials are very strong, not all close to the strength of nanotubes but still massively in excess of that of everyday materials. Although there *is* room for improvement, there's no very compelling reason to believe nanotubes will be so completely different.

It seems I should initiate a thread providing a synopsis about what is technology seen from different scientific disciplines which I have speaking about some weeks ago.

What I seem to recognize in this thread since whoa182's last post is the caution etc. of Engineers - which is required in construction of vehicles for safety reasons and mustn't be neglected -, the look into the future which is one of the essential or important drives of progress (regardless of technical or non-technical) and the tense between demand, task and goal on the one side and the current skills, capabilities and availabilities on the other side.

Both of them is needed and required and non of both can exist without the other - this isn't meant philosphical but is fact.

There is third "party" involved - one of the results of Bradley C. Edwards' researches is that the required strength etc. is possible and achievable - so that is a reasonable task and goal. The recent news mean that there has been a recent progress - that is encouraging. So the research should go on. Edwards said in his NIAC-study that he assumes 15 years until a space elevator can be there - but his study is three or four years old only. So 11 years still to go perhaps - at the current speed of progress there is a chance that he will be right and realistic optimism is justified (in contrary to non-realistic optimism).

I think it is true to say this is a big step forward but it is also true to say that not enough information is available about the material manufactured to determine just how big a step it is.

It is not known how the material will degrade over time or react with chemicals or sunlight so much more research is still needed.

I think that the possibility of creating very light weight solar cells could have a big impact, a solar array a kilometer across would produce enough energy to power a really big ion drive and could also act as a solar sail. Such a device would make nuclear power less important for space craft operating in the inner solar system.

So while being impressive, the jury is out still in what it actually will mean. Now if someone makes this 1km2 weighing 30kg of the stuff that some of the article quote that would be impressive.

I guess I wont get really excited about the stuff until someone builds a spaceship out of it.

_________________A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.